Galactic Missile Defense is a mobile app that's been dumped on Steam as if it was a real PC game (it's not)... it's a cash grab from greedy mobile devs. This mobile app is a simple, dumbed down arcade shooter where a bunch of cartoony UFOs swoop down and try to shoot your three missile bases. You need to use your finger on your iPhone screen to drag and drop ammo and upgrades, as well as tap on coins that are released by some of the UFOs you shoot (once more by tapping on them on your iPhone screen).
From a technical perspective, as a mobile app, this doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
While there are options to change the resolution for the mobile app, all this does is scale up the simplistic 2D art assets used to make the mobile app, which makes little or no difference to the graphics quality. Without any other substantial graphics tweaks, it's not possible for gamers to improve the lacklustre 2D visuals.
The mobile app features simple, cartoony 2D graphics, of the type you normally expect to see in low effort mobile apps. 3D graphics programming does require a degree of skill and competence and unfortunately not all developers have the budget or talent to deliver this, despite 3D graphics cards hitting the mainstream in the 1990's. Considering this is being evaluated as a PC game, having the graphics phoned in like this isn't going to result in a high quality, visually impressive game that PC gamers are used to seeing.
Because this is a mobile app, it carries a number of deliberate design deficiencies. Compromises were made to cater to the iPhones that the mobile app was designed for. These are unfortunate handicaps and limitations that PC gamers shouldn't be forced to accept, but it's evident that PC was an afterthought for the iPhone developers who are to blame for this. The mobile app is deficient as a result of these choices, and would have been so much better without the handicaps that designing games for mobile phones forces upon a game. Once more, mobile devs have made gaming worse for everyone. I didn't spend thousands on building a gaming rig just so I could pretend it's an iPhone.
Some of the defects in the mobile app can be attributed to the choice of using the GameMaker Studio construction kit/toolset. This is a very poor quality toolset favoured by amateur developers as it's cheap and requires little in the way of development skill, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities. Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine. GameMaker Studio is most commonly used to make retro pixel shovelware and cash grabs.
A strong argument can be made that construction kits like GameMaker Studio should never be used to make games for profit, as the "developer", BlackSheep Games has done here. These construction kits are intended to teach people some of the basic principles of game development, and to make small demos to pass around with friends. They're not intended to replace to actual work of real, professional game developers. So it's inappropriate when amateurs try to use these for profit, without any actual, real game development effort taking place. This doesn't result in products that have any real meaningful value for gamers.
These technical defects push this mobile app below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
You don't have to take my word about how bad the mobile app is, we can measure the interest in a game by how much people bothered to play it. Galactic Missile Defense has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the mobile app absolutely failed to capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for upgrading anything, trivial to achieve, but less than 8 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the mobile app. That's a tiny, tiny proportion of gamers who even bothered with this. Ouch.
Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this mobile app was with players reveals a surprise... there's a modest spike in player counts for the mobile app. But this only happened once, and isn't consistent with the achievement stats, that show less than 8 percent of players bothered playing the mobile app for any reasonable amount of time. How is it possible for this mobile app to have so many concurrent players who didn't bother engaging with this mobile app? Trading cards. People will use card idling software to collect the cards and sell them, but this won't trigger any achievements in-game.
That tells us people only really bought this mobile app for trading cards, and that's a damning indictment of the woeful quality. A closer look at the numbers shows the mobile app just has a couple of players every week running up the mobile app and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many mobile apps like this, with little merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.
So, should you buy this mobile app? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?
Once more we see greedy mobile devs trying to scam PC gamers. On Steam, this is $2 USD, on app stores, it's free. Mobile devs must learn PC gamers are not here to be gouged, and can't be expected to pay $2 for a free mobile app just because it's been lazily dumped on Steam. This is unacceptable disrespect for PC gamers. Because this can be played free elsewhere, and because of the other defects, it's impossible to recommend.
Two bucks for a free mobile app!
Who do they think we are?
